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Facebook video chat 'leaks' music plans

Blogger spots hints in video calling app

Facebook’s Skype-based video calling app released this week seems to be ready to link up with a yet-to-be-announced music service, according to blogger Jeff Rose.

The video chat service uses a plug-in allowing users to launch Skype video calls from their Facebook accounts. Non-video group calls are connected to the Facebook Groups setup, and when the company unveiled the tool, Mark Zuckerberg said video group calls are in the roadmap.

Rose decided to look under the hood to see how the video call plug-in worked, and this is where things got interesting: “this installer supports two applications,” he writes, citing this snippet of code:

if (paramString.equals("com.facebook.peep"))

return this.window.getMember("VideoChatPlugin");

if (paramString.equals("com.facebook.vibes")) {

return this.window.getMember("MusicDownloadDialog");

Video chats are handled by the “peep” plugin, but the second app, “vibes”, is currently an orphan. Rose notes, however, that the “vibes” app “connects with a music download dialog in the page’, leading him to speculate that “we are seeing the seeds for Facebook’s upcoming music offering”.

A music service has been on the cards ever since last year, when Facebook hired Spotify designer Rasmus Andersson. ®